Quotation of the Week (43/2010)

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth,
so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.
To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again.
To make a deep mental path,
we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”

Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862)

In Wonderland

 
A labyrinth

In Sweden we have a popular Summer radio program which has been broadcasted daily between mid June and mid August for over 50 years (since 1959); each day with a new host, who gets to talk about just about anything - usually based on their own life - and pick the music themselves. Not unlike blogging, actually…The hosts can be more or less well known authors, journalists, politicians, scientists, actors, athletes, businessmen - whatever.

This summer I have not been listening very frequently, but the other day I happened to listen to a culture journalist and critic, I forget her name but she was of Finnish-Swedish origin and had studied at Oxford University, England.

A hole

A theme she kept getting back to was Alice in Wonderland; following the white rabbit (intuition), and falling from one world into another, where the perspective is completely different and other rules apply than the ones you've previously been used to. She compared this not only to her time at Oxford, but for example also to her teenage experience of a church camp, or (a bit later in life) taking part in a game of live action role-playing.

All part of learning to look at things from different perspectives.

Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter in the movie I’ve not seen yet

She also touched on the aspect - and in my own mind this was one of the things I kept pondering about afterwards - how falling down the rabbit-hole can also be used as an image of falling into depression; suddenly finding yourself in a world where nothing makes sense and everything gets twisted out of proportion. The first thing that happens to Alice in Wonderland is that she finds herself shrinking one minute, and taking on giant proportions the next; while (or perhaps because?) all the normal points of reference are suddenly just not there any more.

  

"Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle!"
– Alice in Wonderland Ch 2 -

I can’t recall when I first read the book, if in my childhood or later on in my teens. Either way, I’m left with a vague impression that back then I just found it a lot of nonsense. Re-reading it now as a grown-up, in English, I find it making more “sense” with every reading… Hm!

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Scroll down to the previous post for this week’s
Booking-Through-Thursday Question.

Why We Dream

A couple of days ago I watched a TV documentary about sleep and dreaming. I've written about dreams before - If you want to find those posts, I suggest clicking that label, below or in the list in the margin.

During the night we go through different stages of sleep. Early dream research showed that people dreamed during so called REM-sleep. So called because during this kind of sleep Rapid Eye Movements occur. Otherwise, however, during this stage of sleep, the body is usually very much relaxed. Later research has shown that we also dream during non-REM sleep. But apparently - and this was the thing I can't remember really having heard much about before - the dreams we have during the different stages of sleep are also of different kind. That is why for example medication can affect our dreams (because they can affect what kind of sleep we have). (Or at least that is one reason why etc.)

It seems that during non-REM sleep, we tend to dream happy dreams. During REM-sleep, negative ones, even nightmares. There is also something called REM sleep disorder - some dysfunction in the brain which disturbs this usually relaxed phase of sleep, and causes people to act out in violent action, like punching, kicking, jumping out of bed etc.

The documentary also dealt with the question why we dream. I don't really have a problem with that - I have long believed from my own experience that it is a way to deal with reality, trying to solve problems etc. During a period of intense dreaming years ago, I came to regard even nightmares as "friends" rather than enemies (helping me to understand myself). Scientific research seems to agree.

Scientists now also add the theory that the function of nightmares is sort of preventive: Their job is to train us in our sleep to contend with the dangers of the day. (Experiments have been carried out on animals which seem to support this idea - forcing them into a kind of REM sleep disorder which makes them act out instead of remaining relaxed.) The idea is that our ancestors, having to deal with a more physically cruel reality than most of us today, needed this nightly mental training to survive. But we seem to be able to adapt even our dreams to modern society - modern adult dreamers seem to adjust their nightmares to be related to modern kind of stress rather than fighting wild animals etc. While children often seem to have the more primitive kind of nightmares.

And even today - if I got it right what someone in this documentary said - it seems that the nightmares may fill an odd function, because it seems that people who are bereaved of REM sleep (the nightmare kind of sleep) actually tend to easier fall into depression than those who do have to fight (a normal amount of) nightmares in their sleep!

(Written down from memory the day after I watched the TV documentary.)
(Photo: My own, from the zoo.)